Educating juveniles in the justice system

March 16, 2014|By Micah J. Miner

Hundreds of inmates sleep together on bunks in a large room of the Cook County Jail in 2013. (Alex Garcia, Chicago Tribune)

"I am getting 15 years on Monday," my 16-year-old student said to me. On his 17th birthday, he will be woken, shackled and transported to the Cook County Department of Corrections and the notoriously overcrowded Cook County Jail. He may get out of prison by age 30, but many of the 16- and 17-year-olds I teach are looking at prison sentences of 25 years or more.

Each day as I enter my classroom, I ask myself: Are we rehabilitating juveniles or abandoning them to become lifetime offenders who will be incarcerated for most, if not all, of their lives? And if we're rehabilitating them, what should their education look like?

It is that time in the academic year when we focus on measuring our students' educational growth. The Common Core State Standards assessments, and new teacher evaluation systems, have profoundly impacted how I teach and what my students learn. Despite the inherent difficulties of implementing Common Core in the environment in which I teach, I have embraced the new standards and the ways they can improve student learning and my own performance.

Our school serves a revolving-door population of about 3,000 students. Most of them are released or placed in a more permanent juvenile justice setting within a few weeks. Juveniles who are being tried as adults stay in the detention center considerably longer as they battle their cases. If convicted, they serve here through age 17, when they are moved to an adult facility.

Many of my students have little interest in school. It's difficult to get them to buy into an educational process with which they have never felt successful.

Before we implemented Common Core, we taught thematically and chronologically. Because our staff used diverse teaching methods, students had varied learning experiences. In my classroom, I worked on teaching in out-of-the-box ways to engage my students, but I had trouble coming up with ways to measure whether they had mastered the content. This was the case across all the classes in my building. We needed to serve students better.

Transitioning to Common Core was challenging. We struggled to plan learning experiences that taught explicit skills. Teachers learned to create skill-based assessments first, then design lessons that taught the skill using the course content. Our students had to get used to the changes in how teachers taught and how to demonstrate what they learned in the classroom.

We are still making this transition, but Common Core already has led to better results. Since phasing in the standards last year, our instructional quality has improved throughout the school. The average reading score grew by 1.5 years. The new standards have helped many of our incarcerated students improve their literacy skills and reengage in the academic process. We have a lot more work to do, but we are on the path toward better learning outcomes for our students.

I believe that all people deserve to be treated humanely, even if they have committed serious crimes. This does not mean I condone criminal acts; I support a strong, effective juvenile justice system. The goal of such a system should be rehabilitation and restorative justice. It should include quality education. This is an urgent issue that policymakers must address. In the meantime, I will continue teaching my students using curriculum aligned with Common Core because the results have been so much better than what I was able to accomplish before.

I only hope that my 16-year-old student will not return to my classroom as an adult offender, the product of a system wasn't sure whether it was punishing or rehabilitating him.

Micah J. Miner is a high school social studies teacher and department chair of a Chicago public school in the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center. He is a Teach Plus Teaching Policy fellow and serves on the Chicago Public Education Fund's Educator Advisory Council.